AGC Federal Procurement Priorities to Become Law
Both the House (last week) and Senate (this week) overwhelmingly passed the National Defense Authorization Act of FY 2016 (NDAA Bill), a bill the president vetoed just two weeks ago. The president is expected to sign the bill into law as a result of the bipartisan budget agreement reached two weeks ago. Compared to the vetoed version of the bill, this NDAA bill has slightly lower levels of spending for Department of Defense programs.
As previously reported, the NDAA bill includes several AGC-backed federal procurement reform provisions that would help prevent individual surety fraud, allow joint ventures to submit individual businesses’ relevant past performance evaluations as part of their proposals—not merely the relevant past performance of the joint venture itself—and fix a recent court decision that would have required small business construction contractors to purchase all their materials and supplies from other small businesses. AGC testified in support of these reforms earlier this year before the House Small Business Committee. AGC has also lead a coalition of 15 national construction trade associations in an effort to push such construction procurement reforms through Congress.
For more information, please contact Jimmy Christianson at christiansonj@agc.org or 703-837-5325.